Month: February 2017

FX

From its opening scenes, it's clear Legion isn't going to be your typical live-action X-Men story. Though it deals with the usual epic battle for the future of humanity, that's just background stuff. The real focus of Legion, which debuted last night on FX, is one man's struggle to become a hero while also coping with mental illness.

Filmed in a hazy alternate reality that looks like a mashup of the 1960s and the 2060s, the first episode begins with weird, stylized images of a kid growing up in suburbia. We flicker between slo-mo memories of riding bikes and jagged snippets of a present-day mental hospital where our hero David Haller (a delightfully twitchy Dan Stevens) has been living for six years. Gradually we realize that one of the most powerful mutants in history is strung out on psych meds, completely convinced that his almost limitless abilities are just a delusion.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

A government report released this week on a cancer-spreading surgical device highlights a weakness in the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to spot harms from drugs and devices on the market.

The surgical device, called a power morcellator, has been on the market since 1991 and is FDA-approved for use in minimally invasive gynecological surgeries, including removing benign uterine tumors (fibroids). The device shreds tissue into small pieces so it can be removed from the body through small incisions. But in the event that a patient has an undiagnosed cancer, the device can fling cancer cells throughout the body, where they can seed new tumors. The first time the FDA got a report of this happening was in 2013—and it was from a patient, not a doctor or hospital using the device. By that time, at least 50,000 US women were having surgery with the device a year, The New York Times reports.

The patient, Dr. Amy Reed, then 40, underwent a hysterectomy due to fibroids, unaware that she had a hidden, aggressive type of cancer. The surgery spread the tumor cells, which became advanced Stage 4 cancer. According to the Times, she has been fighting it ever since, undergoing surgeries for cancer in her abdomen, spine, and lungs, as well as undergoing chemotherapy, radiation, and other treatments.

So long, Death Star. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

The "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act" that would have made it far more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service has been dramatically watered down after running into heavy opposition. Instead of preventing cities and towns from offering broadband, a new version of the bill passed by the Virginia House this week merely imposes new record-keeping requirements.

The original bill favored by cable lobbyists (and called the "Broadband death star bill" by one opponent) would have prohibited municipal broadband deployments except in very limited circumstances. If it had passed, localities wouldn't have been allowed to offer Internet service if an existing network already provided 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. The bill also would have made it difficult for localities to offer lower rates than private ISPs.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, last month promised to veto the bill if it was passed by the state legislature. The proposal also drew opposition from local governments, broadband advocacy groups, and companies such as Google and Netflix. The opposition was successful, as House Republicans replaced the bill with another called the "Virginia Wireless Services Act" and approved it Tuesday by a 72-24 vote. It has now gone to the Senate for consideration.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

Wearables didn't exactly close out 2016 with a bang. According to an IDC report, the sector only grew 3.1 percent year-over-year in Q3 of 2016. While that statistic, along with reports of wearable companies' struggles (Fitbit recently laid off six percent of its workforce) may signal a problem for the sector, Warren Buffett is actually embracing wearables. The billionaire investor, who has been cautious about investing in the tech sector in the past, is diving into wearables with a new smart jewelry line produced by his company Berkshire Hathaway's jewelry subsidiary Richline Group.

The line, dubbed Ela, will debut this spring, starting with smart wristwear—but don't expect to see a smartwatch from the get-go. According to a report from ZDNet, Ela has been working on elegantly designed smart bracelets and plans to extend into other product categories, including rings and earrings, in the future. Ela devices will connect to both Android and iOS devices and share activity data with Apple's HealthKit and Google Fit, although the specific activity sensors that each device will have are unknown. Ela devices will also receive smartphone notifications, and the user can set gems on the device to glow in different colors and vibrate depending on the alert they're receiving.

Cliff Ulrich, product innovation manager for the Richline Group, told ZDNet that a goal was to create devices that are more than just "prettier step trackers." Ela devices will also have their own mobile app with which users can create "memories" that can be shared with a specific device. Content like photos, voice recordings, and songs can be preloaded to Ela devices so that users who are given the device as a gift can open up the content on their smartphones and relive "special memories" they have with the gifter.

Andrew Cunningham

Mini desktop PCs are a well-established market segment at this point, and they follow pretty much the same template. Take laptop or low-power desktop CPUs, slap them on a small motherboard that uses laptop-sized RAM and storage, and pop it all into a little case with lots of ports. It's not an exciting formula, but it gets the job done. Today's ultraportable laptops offer enough speed for most common tasks, and there's no reason to provide a bunch of room for add-on cards and other upgrades that many users will never perform.

But what if there were another option that walked the line between a mini desktop and an old-school mini tower? A little PC with the virtues of a mini desktop, but one that could still be expanded and customized relatively easily? That's the line the HP Elite Slice tries to walk. It's a conventional business-focused mini desktop on the surface, but it also has a port on the bottom that allows you to stack it on top of other modules, adding and removing functionality as needed.